The Seduction OF Solitude (and other short stories)

“Life is a lonely game we try to play with others.” In these short stories, prose poems and fragments, Kim Dallesandro paints vignettes of loneliness and yearning, desire and despair. Her characters are ordinary people under pressure from the world, seeking happiness yet only too often finding it slipping away through their fingers like faery gold. “One of the things that I find astonishing about Kim Dallesandro’s writing is its razor sharp economy. Her short stories have the biblical weight of the classic blues songs put out by Sun Records back in the 50s; little pocket psychodramas that capture not only whole lives but a whole era in microcosm. Comparisons are odious but inevitable, so if I throw a few names onto the table here – Cormac McCarthy, Robert Carver, Shirley Jackson – Kim Dallesandro doesn’t suffer by the comparison.” D M Mitchell (author of Savoy: A Serious Life)